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Business

21 years of airline passenger site visitors progress erased in 2020: journey report

A passenger checks flight information on a board in the departure lounge of Madrid Barajas Airport.

Paul Hanna | Bloomberg | Getty Images

SINGAPORE – More than two decades of passenger traffic growth were erased in 2020, according to a new report.

“The pandemic and its aftermath have wiped out global passenger traffic growth by 21 years in just a few months, reducing traffic this year to 1999 levels,” said Cirium, a travel data and analytics company.

“Compared to the previous year, passenger traffic is expected to decrease by 67% in 2020,” said a press release.

In 2020, only 2.9 trillion passenger kilometers (RPKs) were registered worldwide, compared to 8.7 trillion in 2019. RPKs are used as a measure of air travel.

The aviation industry was hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic as countries closed their borders to contain the spread of the disease.

According to Cirium, the airlines operated 16.8 million flights from January 1 to December 20, 2020. This corresponds to a decrease of 33.2 million in the same period of 2019.

More than 40 airlines have completely ceased or ceased operations, and experts predict that more will fail in 2021, according to Cirium.

Road to recovery

The Asia-Pacific region and North America have “emerged fastest on the long road to recovery,” according to Cirium’s Airline Insights Review 2020 report.

This trend was reflected in Cirium’s list of the world’s busiest airports, which was dominated by airports in the United States and China.

David White, vice president of strategy at Cirium, admitted that big cities like New York, Beijing and Shanghai were missing from the list and told CNBC that airports like John F. Kennedy in New York were “disproportionately affected” in their international traffic normal times. “

“Airports like Minneapolis, O’Hare (Chicago), [Dallas-Fort Worth]”Atlanta and Charlotte now have significantly higher traffic than JFK because of the volume of domestic flights at these domestic hub airports,” he said. A similar pattern has been reported observed in some Chinese airports.

International flights were down 68% compared to 2019, while domestic travel was down 40%.

Cirium expects passenger demand for air travel to recover in 2024 or 2025, with domestic and leisure travel being the first segments to show a “sustained recovery”.

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World News

Tesla TSLA This autumn 2020 car manufacturing and deliveries report

Tesla said on Saturday that it delivered 180,570 electric vehicles in the fourth quarter, beating the previous record and Wall Street expectations. The electric car maker produced 179,757 Vehicles in total.

For the year, Tesla delivered 499,550 vehicles in 2020, slightly missing the latest forecast of 500,000 vehicles.

At an annual general meeting earlier this year, CEO Elon Musk announced to shareholders that he expects deliveries to reach an implicit range between 477,750 and 514,500 cars by 2020 despite the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.

The fourth quarter numbers set a new record for Musk’s auto business, which hit its best-ever level in the third quarter of 2020 with deliveries of 139,300.

According to a consensus among analysts polled by FactSet, Wall Street expects Tesla to report 174,000 vehicle deliveries in the last three months in the fourth quarter. The estimates ranged from 151,000 at the low end to 184,000 at the high end and included projections released between October and mid-December.

In the fourth quarter, Tesla delivered 161,650 Model 3 and Y vehicles and produced 163,660 such vehicles. The automaker also delivered 18,920 S and X models and produced 16,097 of them.

For the year, Tesla shipped 442,511 Model 3 and Y vehicles while 454,932 vehicles were produced. It delivered 57,039 Model S and X vehicles, while 54,805 such vehicles were produced.

In its quarterly reports, Tesla does not split the delivery and production numbers by region. Tesla is also combining delivery numbers for its older Model S and Model X electric cars, as well as newer, more popular Model 3 and Model Y vehicles.

However, Tesla observers can get some understanding of these segments from reports on light vehicle production published by the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

Automakers are required to report to NHTSA the number of vehicles they have made for sale in the U.S. per quarter. Production numbers refer to the make, model, model year, and powertrain of a particular vehicle that each automaker produces for the US market through the end of each quarter.

According to these reports, analyzed by CNBC, Tesla manufactured 66,175 of its 2020 Model 3 electric sedans and 46,773 of its 2020 Model Y crossover SUVs for the domestic US market alone in the first nine months of 2020.

By the third quarter of the year, Tesla was manufacturing more US models for 2020 than Model 3 for US drivers for 2020. Tesla began producing its crossover SUV for Model Y in large numbers for 2020 in the first quarter of 2020.

According to reports from NHTSA Light Vehicle Production, Tesla only manufactured 119 of its 2020 Ys for sale in the U.S. market in the fourth quarter of 2019 – but 29,216 of its 2020 Ys for customers in the third quarter alone. This equates to 28,071 2020 Model 3 in the first quarter and 22,667 of its 2020 Model 3 in the third quarter for the US market.

(Prior to release, NHTSA hadn’t released U.S. fourth-quarter production numbers for Tesla.)

In the course of 2020, Tesla was able to increase vehicle production and deliveries by ramping up production of the Model Y, successfully operating a new automobile plant in Shanghai and bringing in new suppliers of battery cells (together with its long-term partner Panasonic) to get more out of the high-voltage battery packs doing that powers his electric cars.

Tesla announced on Saturday that production of the Model Y has started in Shanghai and shipments of the Model Y Made In China are expected to begin shortly.

Musk has announced that he plans to increase Tesla’s vehicle sales from around 500,000 in 2020 to 20 million a year over the next decade. Plans for a $ 25,000 electric vehicle, Cybertruck, Semi, and the redesigned Roadster are in the works.

After Tesla’s Model S unveiling brought in higher than expected pre-orders in 2016, Musk said the company plans to produce 500,000 cars a year at the Fremont plant by the end of 2018. He also said Tesla would produce 800,000 to 1 million cars a year in Fremont by 2020, then reiterate the target in 2018 with a slight hedge that it could look closer to 700,000 to 800,000 a year in Fremont. The company has apparently not yet achieved this goal in California.

Looking ahead to 2021, Tesla is building new factories in Austin (Texas) and Brandenburg (Germany) to increase production and sales volumes, among other things. Musk warned shareholders on the company’s latest earnings statement that it could take 12 to 24 months to reach full capacity in new factories once commissioned – significantly slower than what Tesla achieved in Shanghai.

With Tesla facing a larger number of competitors in luxury and lower-cost segments around the world, IHS Markit predicts that EV sales will account for 10.2%, or 9.4 million, of the nearly 92.3 million vehicles expected to be sold worldwide in 2024 .

Correction: Tesla slightly missed its target for annual shipments, with the car company producing 179,757 Total vehicles in the fourth quarter. In an earlier version of this story, the annual target and fourth quarter production numbers were incorrectly stated due to processing errors.

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World News

Intel falls on report Microsoft will design personal chips for PCs, servers

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft Corp., speaks during the company’s annual general meeting on November 29, 2017 in Bellevue, Washington.

David Ryder | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Intel fell 6.3% on Friday after Bloomberg reported that Microsoft plans to develop its own chips, possibly for both its Surface PCs and servers.

Intel is known to have a longstanding partnership with Microsoft as the primary processor manufacturer for Windows PCs.

“Since silicon is a fundamental building block for technology, we continue to invest in our own capabilities in areas such as design, manufacture and tools and promote and strengthen partnerships with a large number of chip providers,” said Microsoft spokesman Frank Shaw in a statement.

The report comes a month after Apple started selling PCs with its own M1 processor instead of Intel chips. The Microsoft chips are reportedly based on Arm’s technology, which Nvidia is currently acquiring from Softbank.

Apple’s chips for its iPhones and Amazon server chips are also based on Arm’s instruction set, which differs from the x86 technology mainly used by Intel. According to Bloomberg, Microsoft is more likely to use its chips for servers than for its Surface PCs.

Earlier this month, a senior Microsoft executive didn’t reject the idea that Microsoft would build its own “first party” chips at a conference.

“The partnerships we have in this area, from the OpenAI efforts we have to our relationship with Intel and Arm developments, we certainly point out the need for advanced capabilities here, regardless whether we are building them as a first-party provider or have an ecosystem. This is not yet known by third-party partners, “said Judson Althoff, executive vice president of global retail at Microsoft, during an appearance at UBS Global, Technology, Media and Telecommunications conference on December 8th.

Windows currently runs on Arm-based PCs, usually with chips from Qualcomm. Microsoft introduced the Surface RT tablet in 2012, which contained an arm chip from Nvidia, although the device was discontinued in 2013. Last year, it introduced the Surface Pro X with a Qualcomm arm chip and brought out an updated version of the device this year.

Microsoft announced in 2017 that it was working with Arm server manufacturers to optimize silicon for use in its own data centers.

Intel reported $ 9.85 billion in revenue for its group, which sells PC chips, for the quarter through September. Server chips are also an important business for Intel. For the quarter ended September, Intel reported sales of $ 5.91 billion for its data center group, which sells server chips.

Intel has had problems manufacturing its chips in recent years. Intel controls its own chip factories, known as “fabs”, compared to other chip designers who contract with companies in Asia to make chips to customer specifications.

The more transistors a chip manufacturer can fit in the same space, the more efficient a chip is. Currently, Intel ships chips with 10-nanometer transistors, but special foundries like TSMC are now making 5-nanometer chips that are technically superior.

Earlier this year, Intel CEO Bob Swan said he was considering outsourcing its manufacturing, like Apple is doing.

Intel did not immediately return a request for comment.

– Jordan Novet contributed to this story.

Categories
Health

HHS releases sweeping new report on U.S. Covid outbreak in transfer towards transparency

The Department of Health and Human Services released a comprehensive new report on the state of the U.S. Covid-19 outbreak on Friday, releasing data previously only available to government employees.

The new “Community Profile Report” uses data collected by various agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the HHS Protection System to show the severity of the outbreak in different states and even counties. The first report shows that 35 states are “red,” indicating a major outbreak.

The report also names “selected high-exposure areas” where the number of new cases is increasing rapidly along with the percentage of positive tests. For example, Nashville, Tennessee, Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Somerset, Pennsylvania are high-pollution areas in the first report.

The report also identifies “Rapid Riser Counties” and displays several heatmaps that contain various statistics that are used to determine how bad the local outbreak is in counties across the country. It records, among other things, the death rates, the percentage of positive tests and hospital admissions in Covid.

It is the most comprehensive picture of the US outbreak released by the federal government about nine months after the virus spread across the country. It is a reminder that such data was withheld from the public for months while it was distributed among federal and some state officials.

Jose Arrieta, who served as the chief information officer for HHS when the government launched HHS Protect, the agency’s Covid-19 hospital data warehouse, said the new report was “certainly a step in the right direction” toward transparency. Arrieta resigned in August.

“A number of agency staff, including myself when I was there, pushed for transparency,” he said in a telephone interview on Friday. “I appreciate the fact that the data is being shared.”

Dr. Janis Orlowski, Chief Health Care Officer of the Association of American Medical Colleges, is a member of the working group for White House Health Advisor Dr. Deborah Birx, on improving HHS protection. She said she and other members had been pushing for more data to be released over the past few weeks.

“We pushed for transparency, transparency, transparency … and they are doing a good job,” she said. “I like that it’s transparent and that epidemiologists and other people can look at it and say that’s fine, but it would really be better if we knew X, Y or Z.”

HHS spokeswoman Katie McKeogh said in a statement to CNBC that at least some of the data is in one form or another in scattered reports, but this new report brings it all together.

“As you know, there are different reporting processes at the local, state and state levels, and it has taken time and effort to build consistency between these systems to present the data as you see it today,” she said in a statement opposite CNBC. “This report has been extremely valuable to the federal response and we hope it will be helpful to state and local health departments, hospitals, businesses and the public as well.”

Much of the data in the report has been distributed to governors and state officials by the White House coronavirus task force to guide local Covid-19 strategy. Many of the reports, which in public statements often paint a worse picture of the outbreak than federal officials, were received from reporters.

The new public reports are a major step towards transparency in a federal response that is largely characterized by its opaque data collection.

“We hope that making this data public will help Americans make personal choices to slow the spread,” a group of federal officials who campaigned for the report said in a statement titled “Our data is yours Data”. The group includes Heather Strosnider, Co-Head of Integrated Surveillance at CDC, Kelly Bennett, Co-Head of Integrated Surveillance in the Assistant Secretary’s Office for Preparedness and Response, Amy Gleason of US Digital Service and Kevin Duvall, Assistant Head of Data Officer at HHS .

“HHS believes in the power of open data and transparency,” they wrote. “Publicly publishing the reports that our own response teams use and using the information by others outside of the federal response will only make the data better.”

A federal conflict over data transparency began this summer when the CDC’s data infrastructure proved inadequate to meet the requirements of the Covid pandemic. For example, federal officials needed daily data on the number of Covid patients in each hospital in order to be able to make potentially life-saving decisions about the allocation of scarce resources.

Instead of working on a quick overhaul of the CDC system, HHS rolled out a new data collection system called HHS Protect this summer with the help of federal companies, including Palantir. While many in the public health sector recognized the limitations of the CDC’s data collection system, some saw it as a move by the Trump administration to phase out the CDC amid a crisis.

Orlowski said the detail of the new public report is a demonstration of what HHS Protect is capable of and a testament to the progress the U.S. has made in collecting public health data during the pandemic.

“Never waste a crisis,” said Orlowski. “As long as we don’t increase the burden on the hospital, I believe we must continue to do so.”

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Health

Shares of Penumbra tank after brief vendor releases important report

Penumbra’s shares were down about 17% Tuesday after short seller Quintessential Capital Management released a critical report on the California-based medical device maker. The stock halted shortly after 2 p.m. ET due to outstanding news.

Quintessential Capital is short in Penumbra, which means they are betting that the stock will fall. The company first began targeting penumbra last month, releasing a report of more than 100 slides claiming, among other things, its JET 7 catheter had been linked to at least 18 deaths and 39 injuries. Quintessential Capital also alleged penumbra misled doctors and investors alike.

In its most recent report, Quintessential Capital claims that an “essential part” of the company’s scientific research was carried out by a fake person named Dr. Antique Bose. “This person is a fake. We have no doubts,” said Gabriel Grego, managing partner of Quintessential Capital, on Tuesday in CNBC’s “mid-term report”.

Quintessential Capital directed its allegations of misconduct to the US Food and Drug Administration and wrote to the regulator on Tuesday to open an investigation. According to records that Grego shared with CNBC, the company has also given the SEC a whistleblower tip.

Penumbra has a market cap of around $ 7 billion as of Tuesday afternoon. At the time of Quintessential Capital’s November report for the company, its market cap was approximately $ 9.4 billion.

In a statement accompanying the Mid-Term Report, Penumbra denied Quintessential Capital’s claims, saying that its “innovative medical devices have helped save the lives of hundreds of thousands of patients suffering from life-threatening diseases since its inception in 2004”.

“This attack by bad QCM short sellers reads like an internet conspiracy written by teenagers. It is impossible to deny the facts because there are no facts,” the company said in an email. “Penumbra is very comfortable finding that none of the claims made in the diatribe of these short sellers are true. The claims are nothing more than a baseless campaign of shameless short sellers willing to risk lives for a quick profit. “

– CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this report.